HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - Madison County voters go to the polls Tuesday in a single-issue special election to decide whether to combine the offices of county tax assessor and tax collector. If approved, the measure on the ballot would create a new office of revenue commissioner to handle both assessing and collecting property taxes.

The measure has the support of Madison County Commission Chairman Dale Strong, a Republican, but it is viewed with skepticism by current Democrat Tax Collector Lynda Hall and current Tax Assessor Fran Hamilton, also a Democrat.

If approved, the first election for a new revenue commission would be in November of 2014. The new commissioner would take office in October 2015. Polls are open from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m.

Hamilton, who is retiring after her current term, says separate offices serve as a check on each other. She cites the recent civil lawsuit filed against Marshall County's revenue commission for allegedly conspiring to reduce property assessments and holding illegal tax sales for profit.

But Strong says the consolidation is a way "to do more with less."

"It's been done in the majority of large counties throughout the state, and I think this would be a better tool to manage the revenue opportunities of Madison County," he said in an interview with The Huntsville Times in May.

Cory Brown, owner of The Catbird Seat garden center, who ran for tax collector as a Republican in 2008 on a consolidation platform, said the decision "is a simply a good governance issue."

Brown estimated that eliminating one of the elected positions would save taxpayers $80,000 from salary, benefits and vehicles costs; plus $30,000 to $50,000 savings on postage; $2,000 to $3,000 on office furniture; $30,000 on office space utilization; and $100,000 from personnel consolidation and cross-training.

"This amounts to about a quarter of a million dollars in direct saving per year, every year. This is worth doing," Brown said.

Fifty-five of Alabama's 67 counties have consolidated the two offices into one revenue commissioner, he added, and none have voted to go back to having separate tax collector and tax assessor offices.

Hall says consolidation makes sense in less populated counties with fewer businesses, but that Madison County has far more land parcels to deal with than any of the surrounding counties under a revenue commissioner.

"Real property, we have 176,000 parcels that are taxed, mapped and assessed. We're being compared to counties with 19,000 or 80,000 parcels," she said. "I'm not saying it wouldn't work, but it's going to be a huge job."

She added that larger counties, such as Mobile, had gone to a single revenue commissioner years ago when they were smaller and were able to adapt to more demands slowly as the county tax base grew.

Hall said she would run for revenue commissioner if Tuesday's election requires one, but thinks it would be hard to streamline and consolidate the tax collector and tax assessor offices because the assessor works on the upcoming year and the collector works on the existing year.